


Many-Splendored

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Episode: s01e01 Pilot, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-13
Updated: 2017-02-13
Packaged: 2018-09-23 22:46:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9685004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: How many folks could say they'd touched someone's soul, buried their fingers in its fur and held on?





	

Zuzu settled early, wrapped herself around Raylan’s skinny, bruised arm and stayed there, soaking up the heat from his skin, rattling her tail whenever Raylan’s daddy or his nasty bird daemon came too near.

It wasn’t too surprising, though, that Zuzu twisted from a goshawk into a rattlesnake when Raylan was seven and stayed that way. Zuzu was either a bird or a snake or a lizard — usually a small one, though once she’d turned into a komodo dragon and nearly broken the porch — claimed she favored being cold-blooded and hard to spot; and Raylan was more or less set in his ways by seven years old.

Marrah, on the other hand, didn’t settle until Boyd was going on sixteen, so late that Mrs. Crowder had started to make noise about visiting one of those fancy daemon shrinks way up in Chicago. By then, Mrs. Crowder was far from the only person in the county worried that there was something _wrong_ with her oldest son.

(Raylan didn’t tell anyone but Zuzu — late one night when he’d flopped down on his narrow bed and she’d curled into a circle on his pillow, forked tongue flicking out to scent the air — but he wondered, sometimes, if Marrah ever _had_ settled, or if she and Boyd had just grown tired of the rumors and picked a form she didn’t mind. He wondered how much effort it took them, not to send her leaping from Boyd’s shoulders, paws melting into wings as she reached for the sky.)

Other kids were wary of Zuzu, which was how Raylan preferred it. There were stupid, outdated ideas about reptile daemons and coldhearted men, and Harlan County was the stupidest and most outdated of all the places in the world.

Unfortunately, Marrah seemed to take an especial fondness in riling Zuzu up, pouncing on her tail — only one rattle, too young yet for any more — as a kitten, and then turning into a young, hissing mongoose when Zuzu raised her head to strike.

“Is she bothering you?” Raylan asked, one day at recess, distracted from his upcoming turn at bat by Marrah turning into an eagle and diving at Zuzu before giggling and wheeling away.

“Yes,” Zuzu hissed, then paused. “No. I don’t know if she’s bothering me or not.”

Raylan understood what Zuzu meant. It was exactly how he felt about Boyd.

Later that day, in Reading class, Marrah shook out her bobcat coat and turned into an otter, flopping onto Raylan’s chapter book and inexplicably covering it in mud.

“I think she needs to be in the water,” Boyd told their teacher, looking grave and concerned, though Marrah seemed perfectly fine to Raylan, bounding over to Zuzu and comparing the lengths of their respective tails.

Children weren’t supposed to be able to control their daemon’s forms — though Raylan had his doubts about that, too — and so their teacher couldn’t do anything but shoo Boyd and Marrah out the door. Since Raylan was the only other kid in Boyd’s reading group, because they were both reading high school books while their classmates struggled to master two-syllable words, she didn’t say a word when he tagged along.

There was a creek out behind the elementary school, but Raylan pointed out that Marrah better become a less aquatic creature before they moved away from the water and into middle school next year.

Boyd was watching Zuzu, though, and didn’t respond.

“She’s the prettiest daemon I’ve ever seen,” he finally said, head cocked and apparently engaged in a staring contest with Zuzu, brown human eyes against daemon black. Raylan privately agreed: Zuzu was smooth and cool to the touch, perfect diamond patterns down her back, a tongue that tickled Raylan’s ear when he ignored his alarm, soft dark eyes and a soothing weight on his shoulder when he didn’t want to speak. “She suits you.”

“Ain’t that the point?” Raylan replied, smiled when Marrah’s fur fluffed, offended that _she_ wasn’t the prettiest daemon, and laughed out loud when she bounded out of the water and turned into a peacock, forgetting that there was nothing glamorous in being a pea _hen_.

Boyd shrugged, stretched out his hand without glancing down. Marrah hopped once, fluttered into a rangy, adolescent falcon, and landed delicately on Boyd’s wrist.

“Zuzu knows who she is,” Marrah told them, tilting her head and staring at Raylan. “It means you know who you are. Boyd is stupidly worried that, because I don’t want to spend our life as a _canine_ –” Marrah grimaced, and Zuzu snorted her agreement. Canine daemons were among the most common, and they already had five dogs in their class, sure to be at least six or seven by next year. “- it means we don’t know who we are.”

“Maybe we ain’t anyone at all,” Boyd whispered, looking unusually forlorn, and Marrah pecked angrily at his shirt.

“Just ‘cause your daddy says it, don’t mean it’s true,” Zuzu butted in, something she’d told Raylan at least a hundred times before.

Then she did something she’d never done, uncoiled herself from Raylan’s neck and slithered down his arm, winding onto Boyd’s hand and around his bare wrist. Marrah chirruped happily, then turned into the smallest dandelion puff of a mouse that Raylan had ever seen and settled contentedly on Zuzu’s head.

Raylan shivered despite Zuzu’s pleased burst of heat: she luxuriated in the warmth Boyd and Marrah provided, while Raylan felt stripped down and thrown naked into subzero winds.

“Oh,” Boyd said, a startled gasp, frozen with his arm bent awkwardly in front of him and a rattlesnake curled from elbow to wrist.

Raylan had never felt so exposed as he did that spring afternoon on the riverbank. He’d never understood what had made Boyd fall silent — not until years later, when the world caved in and the boulder would have crushed Marrah if he hadn’t thrown himself over her small form. He scooped her up and felt her heart — Boyd’s heart — racing, tucked her against his chest, grabbed Boyd’s hand, and ran for their lives.

She didn’t climb out of Raylan’s arms until they stumbled out of the mine, into Boyd’s truck and _away_. His fingers were buried in her coal-matted fur, grasping at sunshine on a familiar creek, the bursts of light and color and twists and sharp angles that formed Boyd, skin, marrow, and soul.

He let her go reluctantly, and she and Zuzu wound together on the seat between them, tiny jungle cat and deadly snake. Boyd looked at him, then, for the first time since they’d escaped the mines, but Raylan didn’t say a word. He understood now. Once you touched someone’s soul, what was there left to say?

* * *

When Raylan returned to Harlan, Marrah was still parading around as a margay, small enough that folks mistook her as a leopard cub or a gangly, spotted variant on the sweet domestic house cat. She bounded out of the church before Boyd, down the steps, racing to greet Zuzu like they were still the daemons of teenage boys and not full-grown men.

She carried Zuzu up the steps in her mouth, tail high and proud as any cat that had caught a snake in its yard.

“This is undignified,” Zuzu complained, but she didn’t twist to strike at Marrah’s neck.

“Mmfrblgrh,” Marrah answered, her mouth full, and Zuzu laughed.

It had been a long time, Raylan realized, since Zuzu had laughed. Then Boyd started preaching godawful nonsense, smirking to let Raylan in on the joke, and Raylan realized his own laugh sounded rusty, creaking with disuse. Marrah prodded Zuzu with her paw, and Boyd coaxed and poked Raylan’s face into an unfamiliar grin.

 

A day later Raylan shot Boyd in the heart and Marrah _shrieked_ , loud enough to shatter the windowpanes, the worst sound Raylan had ever heard. He closed his eyes, because he didn’t think he could survive watching Boyd’s perfect, playful daemon dissolve into Dust. Opened them to find himself on the floor, bent over Boyd’s shattered sternum and clutching Marrah’s soft, limp form to his chest, as though holding onto Boyd’s daemon might save them both.

“Call 911,” Zuzu spat at Ava’s daemon, then she slithered off Raylan’s arm and onto Boyd’s neck, curled into the pale hollows of his throat like it was where she belonged.

There was pain and blood and coal-matted fur and smooth, soothing scales and so much goddamned _warmth_ that Raylan nearly screamed, couldn’t take the feeling of Boyd’s soul in his hands and couldn’t let go.

“ _Now_ do you see?” Zuzu hissed, and Raylan didn’t know which of them she was talking to, him or Boyd. “ _This_ is who you are. This is how it’s been all along.”

**Author's Note:**

> Zuzu's full name is Hazureen, but no small child was ever going to master that.
> 
> For the record, I remember little if at all of what daemons are actually supposed to be like. dancinbutterfly came up with Raylan's daemon, and I would like someone to write an AU with merpeople and daemons because I would really, really like Arlo's daemon to be a lamprey eel (and Boyd's to be an octopus, maybe, though I could be swayed).
> 
> For those of you who might not know, this is togina, toli-a is my tumblr username and so it's what I post tumblr drabbles under. Feel free to drop by tumblr and say hi!


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